Growing up in the digital age means filtering memories through the web. Secret Place is an exploration of how memory can be altered and represented by blurring the lines between URL and IRL.

Kingdom Hearts was one of the first pieces of interactive media I felt an emotional attachement to as a child. The game‘s popularity grew in tandem with the rise of YouTube as a social media platform, resulting in a deep online culture built entirely on the game’s weapons, story, and landscape. In Secret Place, footage of the game itself is compared with YouTube videos that bring the culture of the game into the real world. Three text-to-speech voices read a script from one of the game’s pivotal scenes created by a faceless forum commentator. The result is a fractured, blurred memory of the game itself, warped and distorted by time, culture, and community. It is not simply blurred like many IRL memories, but instead supported and maintained by the memories and cultural contributions of others.